This is very similar to an idea proposed by the late economist William Vickrey. He suggested having an auction for visas, and distributing the revenue generated by the auction evenly between every citizen. This would somewhat align the incentives between citizens and immigrants without introducing feel-good steps like scholarship subsidies.

Realistically, there's not very many Americans who could get become an engineer if only they had a little more scholarship money. Those Americans can mostly get loans to pay for college, then pay off their loans using all the extra money they make now that they're an engineer. If you have any empirical data that contradicts this I'd be interested in seeing it.

What kind of financial advice says to take out more loans to make long term investments when you're already deep in debt?

My one data point: I used to be an IT consultant in St Louis. St Louis is roughly half white and half black. The IT departments I worked with were roughly half white and half H1B Indian. The only black employees I saw were the security guards, or were from Africa or the Caribbean.

I’m convinced that H1B provide a barrier to entry for Black Americans into the IT sector.

Additionally, there should be a feedback loop when the economy slows. The Visa cap should be reduced, maintaining the yearly rate. Btw, I don’t envision this visa fee to be a few thousand dollars a year, but in the 10s to 100k per year. Right now, there are American engineers who aren’t being hired, while H1B are being forced back into the office.

Your logic doesn’t follow. Is there more?

You may be convinced, but I'm convinced that the barrier to entry for black Americans is that they don't go to college, and if they do go to college, they don't go into STEM. So they're by and large not qualified to enter the sector.

https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf

It is easy to blame immigrants. But immigrants aren't involved in the bit where the disparity starts showing up in a big way.

Black Americans face systemic issues keeping them out of college. It's complicated and I salute all who even attempt it considering their starting points in life are so much worse.

Everyone agrees that they face systemic issues. People don't agree on what those systemic issues are.

As an example, the California math curriculum is being organized around more extreme versions of the idea of keeping grades together, even though some have not learned previous material. They point to the fact that blacks wind up staying in class to higher grade levels.

Troglodytes like myself point out that if someone is missing key concepts in math, it is absolutely essential that this not be glossed over. You have to go back and fix the foundation before trying to go on. Systemically not even trying to do this allows only the pretense of an education. People like me then point to poor test scores and adult outcomes as evidence that pretending people failed to learn doesn't work. We need to have more rigorous standards, offer more support, and be willing to go more slowly at first until people "get" concepts.

When you look at states by black/white disparities in the prison population, progressive states dominate the bad end of the spectrum, and conservative states dominate the better end. (No state is actually very good, but some are less bad than others.)

My opinion is this. Conservative states do a lot that's obviously bad. What progressive states do is not as obviously bad, but generates worse results. Rigid ideological lectures around equity don't change that. Most people think that we live in a more progressive and tolerant society than we did under Reagan. But black/white wealth disparities have been increasing, not decreasing. Not because of old problems like redlining. Which was banned in 1968. But because CURRENT policies passed since 1980 are bad.

So what would I change? First I would end the drug war. It was always a race war. Second, I would bring back school bussing. Data showed that it really worked.

You don't think that the South's centuries of chattel slavery, and then a century of formal apartheid, and now a kind of less formal apartheid doesn't have a lot more to do with why black Americans face barriers to entry to good professions?

No, it's the immigrants' fault...

There’s plenty of reasons why black American’s fail to succeed, but in IT, the availability of cheap H1B is absolutely a factor. I worked in a Fortune 500 company who hired a ton of engineers from historically black colleges and universities. Probably 30 engineers in our group of around 200. After 4 years many weren’t working out and were let go. Of the 30, I believe just 4 remain. Since then, the company has hired almost exclusively H1B for those positions. Was there a competitive problem with those newly minted engineers, yes. But, they were effectively replaced by H1Bs.

This amounts to imposing a higher tax--which is discriminatory, and treats immigrants with less respect and less human dignity.

You could go the Canadian route--i.e. grant permanent residence to high-skilled immigrants (which lets them become citizens and fully integrate), and not treat immigrants languish on temporary visas, which IMO is belies viewing immigrants (i.e. new permanent residents) with disgust, hatred, callousness, and contempt.

Also, Canada rapidly (like within 1 year) transitions temporary work visa holders into permanent residents, instead of letting them languish as visa holders without basic rights for decades like the US.

Imposing a higher tax based on national origin or immigration status is quintessentially discrimination.

The trade off being that generally Canada pays half as much and most tech high skilled jobs are going to be in metro areas that Canada has few of. Top that with a worse housing crises than what we see in the US.

I also think your argument would be more constructive without some of the strong language you use. For myself it takes away from a constructive conversation and reads poorly.

The higher salaries in the US probably has to do with the concentration of highly-successful tech companies in the US. Not just FAANG et al, but the many small high-revenue-generating companies in the US. There probably isn't as much of concentration of high-revenue successful tech companies in Canada. The lower salaries in Canada probably has more to do with that, than with Canada being more welcoming towards high-skilled immigrants.

I used strong language in my comment earlier, since I've lived in the past for over a decade without basic rights in the US, and since moved to Canada. So this is real and personal to me. Whenever I talked about not having rights in the US on HN, people on HN responded with intense hatred saying things that effectively amounted to "get the fuck out of this country you brown piece of shit", "we hate you", "you deserve to have no rights", "you have no right to expect to have any rights" etc (no, they didn't use those exact words--I am paraphrasing their sentiment--but they expressed an equivalent level of hatred using politer words). You can dig through my comment history to find those comments. To me, it was oddly reminiscent of the hatred white Americans must have shown black people during the Jim Crow era, or Germans towards Jews after the Nuremberg laws had been passed. I just didn't expect so much extreme loathing and hatred toward immigrants to be so incredibly prevalent on HN.

Certainly, I won’t even begin to speculate why salaries are different and I am sure there are more high paying jobs there now but last time I had the chance to look they were always drastically lower for the same company that had locations in both Canada and the US. And often times the cost of living were higher in Canada when accounting for housing.

I am sorry you had the experience you did and I make no argument about your experience. I think it’s hard to push for change in immigration law when there is no shortage of skilled immigrants coming into the US.

> when there is no shortage of skilled immigrants coming into the US

Where did you get this idea from? Ask anybody hiring managers in tech (who are willing to pay well), and they’ll say there’s nothing but a shortage. And I’m sure there’s multiple other fields besides tech with a serious shortage.

Employers requested 758,944 visas for skilled workers (H1B), and the U.S. government due to congressional limits, can only issue 85,000 and will have to reject 673,994 applications.

Source: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

Not sure you understand what I mean or we might be conflating ideas here. Probably best to back away since I know it’s a powerful topic for you but at least let me explain this part.

Your general thesis has been that immigrants are treated as unequals without rights by the US government. I am not arguing if that is true or not. I am simply stating that those processes are hard to change when there is no shortage of people wanting to come to America. There is not a supply shortage of people wanting to come, so there is no incentive to make the process easier/better. Adding proof with your statement that we annually reject more applications than accept.

Yea, you're not wrong about that.

Just because there is demand, doesn't mean it's morally right to treat people badly, and to restrict their rights and freedoms.

Canada is an excellent counter-example to this.

Canada gives most people moving to Canada their full rights and freedom, unlike the US. From a purely moral point of view, that's highly commendable.

There is huge demand (and millions of people willing) to move to wealthy countries the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait UAE, Qatar, etc. That demand and desire exists mostly due to higher salaries there.

There's no reason the US should treat immigrants worse than Qatar or Saudi Arabia (I would say the conditions of the H-2 work visa and especially the undocumented are probably worse than in some countries in the middle east), but the US (or at least Republicans[1] in the US) chooses to do so out of general disdain and hatred towards the concept of granting permanent residence, and integrating new people.

[1] I'm clarifying with Republicans here, since many blue (Democratic) states have indicated they'd like the welcome immigrants, Democratic politicians have introduced legislation that is immigrant-friendly; and all of these efforts have only been opposed to and blocked by Republicans.

I don't understand why so many people take any criticism of the USA as a personal insult.

In many regards USA is a great country, in some/many regards it is not. Constructive criticism like from the parent comment would only make it even better.

It's not like the parent just criticized for the sake of criticizing. He also gave a proposal to improve the whole system. You can agree or disagree, maybe provide a better proposal, but this dismissal brings nothing to the discussion.

I didn't take it as an insult. I truly want other people to not want to come here. The downward pressure on IT salaries is impacting all other sectors of the economy and denying people here access to the economic ladder.

Canada wants to keep their wages low, that's why their immigration is so wide open. If it wasn't mostly Arctic tundra, they would be inundated with immigrants by now.

I'm just going to quote dang to you here:

Could you please not post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? Your account has already been doing it repeatedly. We're trying for something else here!

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

> This amounts to imposing a higher tax--which is discriminatory, and treats immigrants with less respect and less human dignity.

Not all discrimination is wrong. For example, the American immigration service currently discriminates against people by criminality, among many other factors. The purpose of the U.S. government is to serve and protect the American people. If that means discriminating against migrants, that is, literally, their entire raison d'etre.

Do you think Canada doesn't "serve and protect the [Canadian] people"? Do you think Canada rolls out the red carpet to people with criminal backgrounds?

Canada just chooses to welcome skilled immigrants, whereas the US has an immigration prohibition. See: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-legal-immigration-n...

Canada also has a ranking system that picks the best immigrants with the highest scores (unlike the lotteries the US relies on).

But charging immigrants a higher tax rate is discrimination, 100%. Your comment is baseless, and entirely invalid.

You continue to argue discrimination is wrong. I explained that it's not wrong, prima facie. There are good reasons to discriminate. I don't think the Canadian government is serving and protecting Canadians. The Canadian government welcomed a million new migrants last year, into a country suffering one of the worst housing crises in the West. It's clear that not all Canadian immigrants are skilled, with reports that 95% of food bank service is to migrants (https://tnc.news/2023/08/08/food-bank-reports-95-of-users-no...).

I agree with a points based system, but there are clearly many structural issues to the Canadian system.

95% of food bank users are immigrants… but what % of immigrants are food bank users?

Your link also says 65% of food bank users are students.

Anecdotally, I’m an immigrant in Canada, and every other immigrant I’ve ever met is comfortably in the top half of society income-wise, with the majority in the top 10%.

> A total of 95% of those relying on Feed Scarborough were not born in the country, while 72% had only been in Canada a year or less.

I wonder how they collected these statistics. Do food banks seriously hand out forms asking people to fill out (a) their country of birth, (b) how long they'd lived in Canada?

Conservatives and right-wing media in general have shown a proclivity towards making up false statistics and false numbers, if it advances some conservative cause. For example, fake scientific papers denying climate change, or fabricated (un)scientific papers saying that the COVID vaccine is somehow dangerous. I would not trust data someone puts forward blindly.

I agree with the sibling comment that:

> Anecdotally, I’m an immigrant in Canada, and every other immigrant I’ve ever met is comfortably in the top half of society income-wise, with the majority in the top 10%.

This is true in my case as well.

I would argue that "For the year 2022, Canada welcomed 437,180 immigrants and saw a net increase of the number of non-permanent residents estimated at 607,782."

Combined with "About 286,000 new homes are currently built each year, according to 2021 data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. But the country's housing supply is not keeping up with population growth."

Is absolutely not serving the Canadian people when their home prices are completely unaffordable to a growing number of their population. It also suppresses wages for their own skilled citizens.

I do think importing skilled immigrants is a good long term strategy for their country, but they should tone it down a notch until housing prices are better.

The housing shortage is an issue caused by restrictions on building housing. This is supply side problem.

There is restrictive zoning laws, inordinate red tape, extremely high development charges (taxes), super long delays, NIMBYism in general, that all contribute to the Canadian housing shortage crisis.

Immigration is demand side thing. The solution to the housing crisis is to not to try to mess with demand, but to increase supply.

Whenever I look at the Reddit history of a person attacking immigration by bringing up housing, I almost invariably see comments full of racism, xenophobia, a hatred of non-European-origin people/cultures, etc.

> suppresses wages

This statement is wrong, yet abusively often repeated. North America's population went from a few million to a few hundred million in a few centuries. Wages in North America should close to zero if this statement were a true axiom.

"The solution to the housing crisis is to not to try to mess with demand, but to increase supply."

Why? Why should we only worry about supply, especially when that's a much, much harder issue to tackle?

I live in a rural part of the US. There are no real zoning laws to speak of, red tape, high taxes, delays, NIMBYism, etc. None. Zero. Yet our house prices have also surged. My parents were able to afford 60 acres on a construction worker's (single) salary back in the 80s. My wife and I both have degrees and we could afford 15 acres with a much worse house, and that was 10 years ago. My wife's brother just bought a house for more than we spent.

It's in town, which is undesirable around here, on a regular in-town sized plot. The house is half of our home's size and needs a lot of work. Yet it's 25% more than what we paid with a much higher interest rate.

You people in cities always think it's all that red tape you have, but the problem is a lot simpler. There are more people than ever and housing supply hasn't kept up with demand. That is something the Canadian and US governments could fix going forward incredibly easily, without somehow finding 4x the home builders we currently have.

> Whenever I look at the Reddit history of a person attacking immigration by bringing up housing, I almost invariably see comments full of racism, xenophobia, a hatred of non-European-origin people/cultures, etc.

Ad hominem. I'm sure racists bring it up, just as it seems everyone else is afraid to bring it up for seeming like they're racists.

> This statement is wrong, yet abusively often repeated. North America's population went from a few million to a few hundred million in a few centuries. Wages in North America should close to zero if this statement were a true axiom.

That's an incredibly silly argument, and I don't know where to start. Again you're ignoring basic supply and demand. If immigrants didn't suppress wages, companies wouldn't bother hiring them. If they need 10 coders in a department and can't get enough, they'd have to raise their starting wage to entice more potential workers. If they can get 6 and fill the rest with immigrants they don't need to do that.

That's so basic I felt silly typing it on here.

> Yet our house prices have also surged.

Are you aware that housing prices surged during and immediately after COVID, i.e. circa 2020-2022, a time period which had the lower immigration numbers in recent history.

Lowest immigration in recent decades, yet the massive housing prices?

Yet you blame immigrants? Why do you hate immigrants so much?

> an incredibly silly argument ... felt silly

So you respond with the word "silly" repeatedly. Tells me all about your character.

> ignoring basic supply and demand

This is wrong. It's called the zero-sum fallacy. This doesn't apply to labor, at least not in the same way as to material goods. I'm not going to explain it further to you, but my example "North America's population went from a few million to a few hundred million in a few centuries. Wages in North America should close to zero if this statement were a true axiom." demonstrates this.

> raise their starting wage

And you think highly-skilled workers would magically appear out of thin air, as soon as this is done? http://www.paulgraham.com/95.html

> suppress wages

Your tone of language belies an incredible level of hatred, resentment, and rabid xenophobia towards immigrants.

> I live in a rural part of the US.

Why does it entirely* not surprise me that a rabid immigrant hater is from a part of the rural US (likely a Trump-supporting region), and which likely has seen few immigrants (versus liberal states/regions)? Rural areas with few immigrants that are responsible for much of the hatred towards immigrants at the national level.

The wickedness of restricting the free movement of people is that people like you want to use the violence of the state to exclude people peacefully moving. It's a morally evil thing to do. It makes you morally monstrous (not that you'd ever care of regret repent of it, I'm sure).

Personally, I really shouldn't engage with absolute evil moral monster like yourself, it's not great for my mental health. It makes HN a toxic, and suffocating place. Thank you (/s) for making HN far less welcoming, with your xenophobia.

I've generally avoided engaging in any immigration-related thread on HN for a few years now to the vitriolic level hatred of immigrants that many people here hold. This post has sort of been an object lesson in that -- most of the responses to my comments have been of a xenophobic nature. So I probably should go back to ignoring immigration-related thread on HN.

> Whenever I look at the Reddit history of a person attacking immigration by bringing up housing, I almost invariably see comments full of racism, xenophobia, a hatred of non-European-origin people/cultures, etc.

I think it is unfair to make these kind of statements. You are essentially telling the parent poster that they are racist. Perhaps your experiences have created your own kind of biases and hatred.

I agree that often times people do use secondary arguments to guise what they really mean but I think the way through that is to either refute their arguments, not to suggest they are racist.

The problem with the Canadian way is that we allow family reunification. As a Canadian taxpayer I don't want to pay for the economic emigrants parents and grandparents social security and health care.

For the refugees, I have no problem with family reunification because if the situation is bad enough to qualify for our humanitarian refugee program, chances are that it's also bad enough for the rest of that migrant family.

Canada only allows 28,500 parents and grandparents[1] as permanent residents per year (and that limit was 20,000 until recently). That's just 6% of the total immigration target.

There is a temporary visa for parents and grandparents, but there is no access healthcare with it, which is serious matter[2][3][4]. For example:

> She says he needs a different type of care and has even offered to pay out of pocket, but she can’t get him into a long-term care home without an OHIP number.

Did you bother to google Canada's family immigration laws?

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/citizenship-immigrati...

[3] https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/kingston-ont-woman-fighting-for-pa...

[4] https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/no-ohip-no-health-ca...

I read a few pages on canada.ca and you are right they don't become citizens they obtain a "super visa" and are forced to buy a medical insurance from a Canadian provider.¹ I have no more opposition to the reunification program !

1) https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...

It's pretty sad that you rejoice in other people being treated badly (or unfairly).

With a 200k CAD income, I'm likely[1] a top 10% earner. Most immigrants to Canada likely earn more than the average Canadian, since the Canadian immigration system heavy selects for high-skilled individuals with. So, considering skilled immigrants' tax contributions are likely quite a bit higher, don't immigrants' parents deserve to have full access to free healthcare?

[1] The statistics top out at 100k: https://www.statista.com/statistics/464262/percentage-distri...

Maybe not evidence exactly, but the stereotype of the barista with a fancy degree and lots of loans comes to mind.

> Those Americans can mostly get loans to pay for college, then pay off their loans using all the extra money they make now that they're an engineer.

The flaw in that kind of logic is:

1: Many people who enter college can't graduate, for many different reasons.

2: Many people who graduate are incapable of working in the field they studied for, again for many different reasons.

In my experience, I went to an expensive school that had a high dropout rate. A lot of the dropouts were people who either had poor study habits, or simply weren't able to understand the material. Unfortunately, everyone who took out loans and then dropped out still had to pay back the loans.

That's why all the smart people became home contractors and started their own business.

Well, that was some of the best advice I heard in high school. I went to a religious "prep" school, and one of the best teachers I had pointed out that fact to us.

He basically said that, if you're planning on working in a field that does not need a college degree, it's not "worth it" to go to college. In 4 years, you'll be making more money then someone graduating, and have no debt, and have savings.

It was "sacreligous" on his part because the school had a 99% college acceptance rate; but years later I bumped into an alumn from my class who went the contractor / no college route, and was doing well and very happy.

Edit:

> That's why all the smart people became home contractors

That's not a job for everyone, which is why college is also needed. I'd really hate being a home contractor, for many, many reasons. College was the right path for me, but I'm under no illusion that it's the right path for everyone.

IMO there are many Americans who would work in IT/Tech if you paid them to do it, but the risk calculation doesn't currently make sense. If you're an adult making $25-35/hour in your current job, just meeting rent/utilities/obligations, it's hard to accept going back to school for several years to complete a Bachelor's degree, with zero guarantee of employment, but a definite guarantee of debt on the order of ~60K (taking a cheaper option). This is also true for those lower on the socioeconomic totem pole, whose parents are not going to pay for them to go to school. We've seen the result of making student loans widely available, there are many under-employed Americans in debt.

Numerically I agree with you, the debt load is worth the risk, if you're specifically going for software/IT, but the risk is not zero.

I don't know how many typical hourly workers are going to be able to be reasonably trained for it, but there are some. The vast demand for it and tech workers should pull them in. But it doesn't, cost is one reason, but a bigger reason is it's hard or they think they can't do it or are actively dis-interested.

One way to see this is that a million people every year who are already in college choose not to study cs or it type things. They could do it as part of regular college but they don't. Then they get out and can't get a job.

The debt load is worth the risk for someone who's wanted to be an engineer all their life and has seen signs in their schooling they are likely to be good at it. I think the debt load is very questionable, for someone who is at the margin between being an engineer and not being an engineer, has no indicators they would be good at it. Plenty of engineers (especially outside big cities) end up peaking at $80k/year which isn't worth taking a huge amount of debt for especially if their alternative is earning $60k/year already.

Don't forget the other problem we're running out of labor in the US.

> I want a bidding system for the H1B slots, paid not just once, but yearly by the companies which hire the H1Bs

I want to eliminate the H-1B (and some other non-immigrant economic visa categories, but the H-1B is the most salient) and instead allow would-be immigrants or temporary workers not admitted under any other visa category but not personally disqualified from entry to get an annually renewable paid self-sponsored work-eligible visa (with lower fees for those eligible but on a waitlist in an immigrant visa category) . If employers want to pay for the cost, they can, but the worker’s visa status won’t be dependent on them.

Annually renewable would be borderline evil.

For some reason, the US is incapable of renewing visas for people who are already in the country. You can renew status, but not visa. If you renew your status and want to travel internationally, you must get a new visa if you want to return. And, for unknown reasons, that can take a lot of time even in trivial cases. Such as when the applicant is already living and working legally in the US.

> For some reason, the US is incapable of renewing visas for people who are already in the country.

We choose not to prioritize and allocate resources to it (or choose to bureaucratically overcomplicate it given the resources allocated to it).

It’s not fundamentally hard, failure is a choice. And its a choice we shouldn’t make.

> If you renew your status and want to travel internationally, you must get a new visa if you want to return. And, for unknown reasons, that can take a lot of time even in trivial cases.

If that's true, you couldn't visit your family back home?

Personally, I have spent a lot of energy dealing with partially dysfunctional immigration system, I would not be willing to do that again

You can visit home, but you might end up stuck there.

Leaving the US as a non-immigrant always carries a small amount of risk: CBP can always decide to refuse your next admission, even with a visa. After the recent spate of tech layoffs some H1-B holders have been asked to show recent payslips at the border to prove their continued employment, for example.

If you’re super unlucky (with your citizenship, or even just sharing a name with someone on a list) visa renewals can be delayed by months to years for security checks (“administrative processing”).

There are also some green card routes which require a period where you simply can’t leave the US without abandoning your application, after which you’ll be refused entry as a non-immigrant and will need to do the entire multi-year immigrant visa process from your home company. H1-B holders avoid this, fortunately, but TN holders and tourists who get married and decide to stay can get caught out here.

tl;dr: the US immigration system is actively user-hostile.

> a period where you simply can’t leave the US without abandoning your application

This is crazy. I would inderdtand if the Gov asked for a million dollars upfront, but this is just pointless abuse and cruelty.

UK has the same shit, if you apply for Permanent Residency you can't leave, and my parents suffered a serious ilness and I couldn't go.

Or, you know, you could go the Canadian route--i.e. grant permanent residence to high-skilled immigrants (which lets them become citizens), and not treat immigrants (i.e. granting immigrants permanent residence) as a matter to be viewed with disgust, hatred, callousness, and contempt.

Also, Canada rapidly transitions temporary work visa holders into permanent residents, instead of letting them languish as visa holders without basic rights for decades like the US.

And once you get Canadian citizenship, you can make the bigger bucks in the USA under NAFTA (or whatever it is called these days).

> Or, you know,

This is an obnoxious way of starting a point.

How so? (I'm not a native speaker)

When I looked into it, I found that Canada’s really serious about the high-skilled part (or high-credentialed, anyway). A bachelor’s in CS and pile of experience won’t cut it (in fact, experience can hurt, because being older hurts your score) unless you have already landed a job with a Canadian company.

FWIW, employers pay $750-1500 into The American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (ACWIA) fee when they apply for an H-1B.

Right, but if these people are skilled migrants working in in demand areas, that's 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less than an auction would raise.

People on H-1B do pay into programs like social security which they won’t be able to repatriate when they leave.

Agree that an auction will raise more money. My point was that there is significant amount of money H-1B programs generate already.

Social security and Medicare. H1b holders pay into both but are not eligible for either. They are not entitled to get it back even when they return to their country of citizenship.

So yes - there’s a whole lot of $$ that are currently paid into by h1b holders.

The payment should be by the employee, not the employer, but perhaps pre-tax.

This way the difference between an H1B and a real citizen employee is transparent to the employer, and the employee can move between companies without issue (or even take time off work, as long as they still pay)

No. The employer should be required to pay market rate, plus whatever they bid on the slot. Now, you could convince me that the additional fee is evenly split between the employee and the employer.

Any excess money the employee has is either spent in driving up the local rental market, enriching landlords, or sent back to their home country. Minimizing rental competition is in the best interest of US citizens. Minimizing exporting money is in the best interest of the US government.

This won’t happen, that would not be a market equilibrium. What will happen is that the sun of fee and immigrant salary will match the non-immigrant salary.

It makes no difference who pays, save for what you propose about free movement between companies.

If it is paid by the employee, then companies would probably reimburse at least part of it. If it is paid by the company, it is already factored in the .salary amount. In the end, both employer and employee only care about the net amount the pay or get.

Absolutely it does. Let’s say that the market rate for a job is $100k. The company, over time, has a bunch of “overpaid” senior employees making $200k. Now they want to lay off all their senior employees and replace them with H1B. Currently they must pay the H1B $100k. With the additional tax, they now must pay $100k + (tax) * (some multiplier due to laying off US employees), which could bring the cost of the H1B worker much closer to the US workers salary of $200k.

Now let’s say that the H1B, when he receives his $100k salary, goes and rents an apartment. He pays $2000/month for the apartment and lives in a nice luxury rental, and the apartment complex has one less available unit and charges $2100/month to future renters. The H1B is sending $30k/year back home. Instead, let’s say the H1B must also pay a $40k tax/year from their $100k salary. Now the H1B isn’t renting a luxury rental. They’re sharing a bedroom in a house, and sending $5k/year back home. The luxury rental stays on the market longer, and the next renter pays $1900/month, instead of $2000/month.

The key is that the H1Bs will take significantly lower than the “market” price which companies are being forced to pay. The companies are willing to pay significantly more than “market” price in order to displace their older workers. The claim for this system to work is that there aren’t enough US citizens to perform the work, and yet they’re laying off older US workers.

A bidding system will help tech companies in California more preferentially than the agricultural engineering firm in Alabama. Is that better for the US? I’m not sure

Yes. It will raise wages for everyone.

And where will the money come from? I often hear requests for higher wages, but nobody ever volunteers to pay more to fund such wages.

Record corporate profits and executive compensation can be reduced to return value to the workers.

No company would bid more than they can afford in an H1B auction.

The amount they pay will be more than offset by the value generated by high skill of the highly skilled employees this gives them access to.

> there should be a multiplier on that fee for any company which lays off US citizens with that skill in the past N years

Under that proposal I would probably not hire a US citizen at all if a foreigner is available. Sure the foreigner might be more expensive (that is: if I am not reducing his salary to compensate for the H1B fee), but at least I don't have that Damocles sword hanging over my head. Especially if the firing happens in a time of hardship when my finances are already strained, that could be the straw that breaks the camel back.

H1B minimum pay is supposed to ensure it is for highly paid and highly skilled workers. Not something to be exploited to suppress wages or keep employees hostage.

And yet you regularly see companies laying off their more senior employees in favor of H1B either directly or through hiring TCS or Infosys to bring in an army of H1Bs.

If you have noticed, that army of h1b has whittled of late. Most of the firms will hire us citizens and perm residents locally but provide liberal work visas in Canada where it is a lot easier. So I don’t think the army of h1b is the same size as before. It’s most likely in Canada.

A lot of firms also hire direct in India. Accenture or ibm will have a token representative in the us with a majority of the worker bees in India. I think singling out Tcs or infosys is a bit of a dog whistle. The biggest offenders are American consulting companies.

You are proposing a mechanism for determining the price but not the quantity. And, since the quantity can be arbitrary, then, thought bidding, so can the price (within limits).

Furthermore, if the H1B is causing a cost/loss to someone, then the money should go to these people. You can argue that the H1B is harming local workers, but it cannot possibly be harming future/potential workers to which you propose to give the scholarship.

They already do (or did) this. It's how I got into programming. Company got a grant and put together a training program.

Eric Weinstein proposed something similar back in 2004 (https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/j.1564-913x.2002.tb00238.x). A kind of "migrant dividend." It would align all kinds of currently misaligned economic incentives. No economic policy is costless. Least not migration. Unfortunately most of the costs of high migration are borne by the poor, and most of the benefits are borne by the rich. A migrant dividend would go a LONG way to better distribute the benefits and compensate the poor for downward pressure on wages and working conditions. These dividends would demand employers think long and hard about their real need to employ foreign labour. I suspect they're perfectly capable of finding skilled labour locally. They just want to cut labour costs by hiring H1Bs.

The dividends could be used for a raft of things, including what you've suggested. Alternatively, it could simply be divided by every person in the country and evenly distributed. Dividends, as they offer in Alaska, are very politically popular, and stand a good chance of being legislatively approved.

> No economic policy is costless. Least not migration

As with all of these discussions: what costs? And how does this differ from the costs of children being born and coming of age into the workforce? Should we in fact be enforcing birth, schooling and university quotas to limit the rate at which new humans can enter the skilled workforce?

> As with all of these discussions: what costs?

I'll use one of the most cited papers on migration (https://www.jstor.org/stable/24739100) (part of the text here: https://www.oecd.org/els/38195773.pdf). It's a longitudinal study on Denmark during the period of 1991-2008, exploring the results of a wave of new refugees in the country.

The tl;dr is that low-skilled natives were effectively pushed out of their previous employment. They could not, or would not, compete with the migrants owing to ostensibly lower wages and worse working conditions. Instead, they leveraged Denmark's generous free education system, and earned degrees. This afforded them higher wages over a long period of time.

So, one of the costs of high migration - particularly low-skilled migration - is that the poorest lose their jobs, or earn less, or have to work in worse conditions. If you live in a country without free university education, these people will have to contend with a permanent quality of life downgrade.

Then there is housing. The West has experienced enormous pressure on rental and home prices over the last couple of decades. Part of the reason for this is high migration. People need to live somewhere. In many places, for various reasons, production has not kept up. This means locals are forced to pay more for accommodation. This, once again, disproportionately impacts the poor.

I also cite demand for social services and infrastructure, which also appears to be failing to expand at sufficient pace in many nations.

> And how does this differ from the costs of children being born and coming of age into the workforce? Should we in fact be enforcing birth, schooling and university quotas to limit the rate at which new humans can enter the skilled workforce?

Your question implies no distinction between locals and immigrants. That is clearly incorrect. A nation exists to protect the wellbeing of its citizens, not citizens of other nations.

>No economic policy is costless.

There exist Pareto optimal economic policies.

Yes but the costs and benefits are not evenly distributed.

It really isn’t hard to move those tech jobs abroad and then have Americans go to India or China instead on working visas (eg a Chinese Z visa I had for 9 years). The USA is maintaining some kind of balance with their H1 program: enough to encourage keeping those jobs in the USA, but not enough to be a free for all for immigration. It isn’t doing really good at that, but an overly punitive H1B program will simply cause those jobs to switch to other countries.

Yep. Since OP mentions working as IT consultant, I can easily see how that field being dominated by IT shops that merely checkbox one or more of H1B critireas. I can see how his/her perspective is colored.

But if you make visa program too punitive, then folks will simply chose not to come. A person in their 30-40s, want stability so as they can raise their kids, have a place to call home and not be on a perpetual cycle of anxiety.

In my mind, this will disincentivize folks who have most to contribute to US economy. I don't know much about China but for folks who are really good, salaries in India is already pretty high and closer to US salaries and will have fewer reasons to immigrate.

Chinese tech salaries are pretty good, so much so that they attract workers from adjacent countries like Japan where tech salaries are traditionally less good.

> It really isn’t hard to move those tech jobs abroad

It isn't? They've been trying their hardest since the late 90's, and have never been able to make it work. They'd love to pay $1.00/hour for programming work in Bangladesh like they do for textile manufacturing, but as of a quarter-way through the 21st century, they haven't been able to.

It isn’t. There is a cost, it doesn’t make sense right now to pay those costs beyond a few R&D centers. But make work visas harder to get in the USA, then it will make sense to do more R&and abroad.

I say we should have open borders

> the H1B slots

The number of slots feels extremely arbitrary to me. Is it based on anything remotely 'real'? As in statistics or other hard numbers? Or is it some 'magic number' that Congress handed down at some point?

The US immigration system for skilled labor is fundamentally broken.

We give out student visas openly, incentivizing universities to bring on large numbers of international students at full rate vs. discounted local students. We then do not provide immigration visas to these same students, leading to them being deported some years into the professional workforce.

This is a recipe to create a skilled labor shortage.

In fairness, that system wasn't designed to increase the # of skilled workers in the US, it was designed to propagate and spread "American values" overseas.

A half century ago, the idea was that you bring a lot of the best and brightest of poorer foreign nations to the US for a university education. Then they return to their home nation and eventually work their way up to positions of power. Hopefully, their positive view of the USA will influence their decision making. In addition, many will have maintained contacts they made during their school years.

It's not a crazy tactic given that the cost was mostly borne by the foreigners.

Do you have any sources for your assertions?

This might be controversial but I think the situation cannot be changed with scholarships. Somebody with the will can do courses in community college and become employable.

The way to solve is by more parental guidance. American parents usually leave everything to the kids to decide. STEM courses are hard. Asian parents push their kids to take difficult subjects even if the kids resist.

You might as well just send the money to the universities directly. The universities don't take the extra money and hire more professors to fill the supply they divert the money to non-education activities. College isn't even about education anyway it's some weird social signaling game where the more people with a badge(diploma) the less the value of the badge.

I came to the US on an H1B. I worked at Microsoft and Facebook. Then I started a company funded by YCombinator. It is now a unicorn and has created hundreds of jobs.

This country treats immigrants unfairly but even that poor treatment represents more opportunities for them than elsewhere. So they put up with it. But that won’t always be the case and it’s already very different than when I came here. Not sure I’d decide to immigrate to US if I were starting today, knowing what I know now.

what has changed that would make you less likely to immigrate today?

A lot. Pandemic accelerated globalization. Availability of VC money used to be exclusively American but is now global.

the key part is 'knowing what I know now'

I migrated, not to US, and my brother stayed. We work in the same industry, and has 2x my quality of life with 60% of the income.

Peope who immigrate on these visas are typically not lower class in their home societies, they are usually upper-middle class. And usually you wnd up just in the middle class in the west. And standarss of living for middle class have beeen declining for the past 10 years or so, while developing nations are developing.

There is also cost to immigration - losijg contact with family, expense and stress of applying for visas, etc. You wouldn't make the jump for like 10% improvement, the QoL improvement has to be at least 50% for it to be worthwhile.

Giving up comforts of home is not easy and there has to be a 2X improvement in QoL for the move to be justified. And I’m not sure there is any improvement in QoL honestly. You get some you lose some. It’s more or less an even trade at this point.

The H1B and EB green cards are already pretty expensive. I’m pretty sure the USCIS is using that money to subsidize its other activities.

American university education is really expensive. I don’t think any amount of money from this is going to help subsidize that. I’m not sure why it is so expensive but charging more for h1b and green cards isn’t going to help that cause.

Edit: I support the idea that the US workforce should be self sufficient and not rely on immigration. That has to come through reducing cost of higher education. I just don’t trust the uscis to give up their $$ in support of that cause.

This can only possibly work if education in US is made cheaper. Otherwise it's just free money to US universities, that are already swimming in money